The duo used wood and soapstone countertops and stainless-steel appliances to modernize the kitchen, though the original flooring remains. New windows bring in natural light. The oil is by Johannes Hüppi.

The duo used wood and soapstone countertops and stainless-steel appliances to modernize the kitchen, though the original flooring remains. New windows bring in natural light. The oil is by Johannes Hüppi.

The duo used wood and soapstone countertops and stainless-steel appliances to modernize the kitchen, though the original flooring remains. New windows bring in natural light. The oil is by Johannes Hüppi.

This article originally appeared in the February 2009 issue of Architectural Digest.

Austin, Texas, is well known as a city that nurtures free expression and rewards eccentricity. In many of Austin's older neighborhoods, it's not uncommon to find a purple house with aqua trim on a block of unassuming white clapboard bungalows, or a Modernist glass-and-steel box on a street lined with gingerbread cottages. No one really minds; this left-of-center city in the heart of a conservative state takes pride in its long history of standing out from the crowd.

Having said that, there are some parts of town where you can't get away with doing just anything. One quiet neighborhood not far from downtown and the University of Texas campus is filled with the sort of sober, stately homes—built mostly during the 1930s and '40s—that give it the feel of a well-to-do East Coast suburb: a slow-talking Lone Star cousin to Rye, New York, or Chevy Chase, Maryland. Like those other idyllic bedroom communities, this one demands of its residents a certain degree of respect for tradition.

Austin-based architects Juan Miró and Miguel Rivera had to be careful, then, when they agreed to oversee the complete renovation of a 1940s house on one of this neighborhood's quietest blocks. The owners, Mike Kaeske and Lynn Bradshaw, moved to Austin from Dallas not long ago, choosing the neighborhood for its enviable proximity to Austin's vibrant downtown. The house, comfortably large without being grand, "is really an exercise in how to live not-so-big," says Kaeske. "The goal was to make it as perfect as possible, not as big as possible."

And also to make it blend in. Miró says, "You know that something has happened to this house, but it's not one of those transformations that completely changes the character." A character-changing transformation did take place here once before, however—back in the 1980s, when the house's then owner green-lighted an awkward addition. When he took on the renovation project, Miró told his team: "Let's try to bring back the house's original character but eliminate any trace of the addition—and instead add some interventions that are clearly from our time."

That's exactly what they did. The nondescript front door was replaced with one custom-made from chocolate-colored ipe wood; the Colonial-style entrance canopy and columns were transformed into striking metal-clad sculptures that reference their forebears in roughly the same way a stealth fighter references a Sopwith Camel. But even touches that would have seemed outlandish a generation ago—the tall, narrow sidelight windows; the metal roof—are kept in line by the architects' disciplined approach. The white clapboard and muntined sash windows (sans their black shutters) leave no doubt that this remains a specimen of Colonial Revival.

Juan Miró and Miguel Rivera, of Miró Rivera Architects, worked with Mike Kaeske and Lynn Bradshaw to give their Austin, Texas, home a modern look without disrupting the traditional feel of the neighborhood. The architects streamlined the rear façade of the house by removing a porch and fireplace and adding a covered walkway.

Inside, Miró and Rivera stained the original oak floors to contrast sharply with the bright white walls, creating clean, crisp gallery-like rooms for the couple's art collection, which features works by Andy Warhol, Lee Krasner and Sam Francis, among many others. Miró tries to conjure up the right words to describe his goal of reviving the house's moribund rooms without overplaying his hand. "It's subtle yet assertive," he says. "Is that possible?" He thinks for a moment about how to reconcile the two ideas, before settling, with a smile, on the mot juste: "It's confident."

Confidently, then, did he and Rivera sweep through the house, opening up spaces and letting exterior light flood into rooms that had hitherto resembled the warren of a particularly depressive rabbit.

In the backyard sits a pyramidal sculpture by Sol LeWitt—bold, solitary, beaconlike. Like any powerful piece of art, it draws a visitor ineluctably toward it. A long walkway with a slatted ipe roof shelters the approaching viewer; the pathway has a twin in the sleek, narrow lap pool that runs parallel to it.

"When you see the house from the street, you get the sense that there might be something special going on inside," says Kaeske. From the backyard, looking through giant windows at rooms intelligently reconsidered by Miró and Rivera, that sense is confirmed unequivocally.

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